Good Fences, Tense Neighbors in Broadway's Clybourne Park

Have you ever gone to the theater and felt so embarrassed and uncomfortable by what was happening onstage that you wished you could crawl out of your own skin? Of course you have, but I’ll bet you didn’t enjoy it. Well, have I got a show for you. It’s called Clybourne Park, it opened Thursday night at the Walter Kerr Theatre, and it’s the most cheerfully scabrous, savagely intelligent American comedy to come along in some time, which is to say that it’s guaranteed to have you squirming in your seat and loving every minute of it. The subject, you see, is race in America, as well as the euphemisms, evasions, and politically correct bromides we use when we talk—or try not to talk—about it. Just in case you still had any illusions that, as a society, we’ve evolved to a point where we can have that discussion without banging into the furniture, breaking the good china, stumbling into booby traps, and setting off depth charges, this play by the prodigiously gifted Bruce Norris will set you straight.

Directed with ruthless precision by Pam Mackinnon,Clybourne Park offers a time-traveling riff on A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 family drama about the fierce yearnings and thwarted dreams of black America that literally changed the face of Broadway. That play ended with the African-American Younger family getting ready to move into a house in the fictional all-white Chicago neighborhood of Clybourne Park, despite a less than friendly welcome from one of their future neighbors who shows up at their apartment and urges them to reconsider. Norris’s play picks up where Hansberry’s left off. Literally.

The curtain goes up on the Father Knows Best–era Clybourne Park living room (designed by Daniel Ostling) of Russ (Frank Wood) and Bev (Christina Kirk), a middle-aged white couple who, in the wake of a personal tragedy, are packing for a move to the suburbs with the help of their black maid, Francine (Crystal A. Dickinson), who seems curiously resistant to accept Bev’s gift of an unwanted chafing dish. As you’ve probably guessed, this is the same house about to be inhabited by Hansberry’s Younger family. And soon enough, Karl (Jeremy Shamos), the same man who has just failed to talk them out of moving into the neighborhood, pops by for a visit, with his deaf, pregnant wife Betsy (Annie Parisse) in tow, hoping to convince Russ and Bev to back out of the sale. Joined by a physically and morally lazy local clergyman (Brendan Griffin) and Francine’s diffident husband (Damon Gupton), the conversation quickly escalates from strained but polite dancing around the issue to an ugly and anguished verbal bloodbath.

Cut to 50 years later, and Clybourne Park is now a predominantly black neighborhood in the throes of gentrification after decades of decline. This time, it’s a white couple looking to move in: the wisecracking Steve (Shamos) and the very earnest, very pregnant Lindsey (Parisse), an attractive, young, liberal-minded pair who know a good deal in an up-and-coming area when they see one. They’ve shown up at the house with their ditzy, white lawyer (Kirk) to discuss their planned renovations with Lena (Dickinson) and Kevin (Gupton), a black couple from the neighborhood association, and their gay, white lawyer (Griffin). Despite this being a meeting about real estate and property values, things start out civilly enough, and the two couples go out of their way to show how much alike they are (they’ve both been to Prague! They have a mutual friend who’s black!). But then Steve decides that, in this post-racial era, it’s cool to tell a joke about a white man sharing a prison cell with a black man. His wife begs him not to tell it, and we fervently hope that he won’t, but tell it he does, flinging open a Pandora’s box of resentment and racism that can’t be shut. The stunned silence that greets the joke is as excruciating as the storm of nastiness that follows, though it’s more than worth it to see the look of pain and frustration on Shamos’s face as he digs himself deeper and deeper into a hole, not to mention Dickinson’s triumphant glee when she tells a joke of her own (you will learn what white women and a certain feminine product have in common).

With its vivid depiction of how little has really changed in half a century, Clybourne Park cuts deep. Norris has a master satirists gift for skewering the hypocrisies of white, liberal America, but he’s too good a writer to let anyone off the hook. You may not much like any of the characters in Clybourne Park, but you’ll feel tremendous sympathy for them, because Norris has located the well of loneliness, born out of an inability to communicate, that creates unbridgeable divides— between white and black, neighbor and neighbor, husband and wife. He is aided immeasurably here by a cast of superlative actors, who, under Mackinnon’s direction, are doing some of the best ensemble work you will ever see.

Clybourne Park comes to Broadway after a heralded 2010 run at Playwrights Horizons and a 2011 London production, having picked up a bunch of awards along the way, including an Olivier and a Pulitzer. Given its prickly subject matter and lack of name-brand stars, it’s easy to see why it took so long to get here. But it’s a play that deserves, and thrives on, the wider platform of a Broadway stage, It’s also the kind of unapologetically entertaining, deeply satisfying serious comedy, serving up bleak truths and sulfurous laughs in a well-made package (I’m thinking of August: Osage County and, currently, Other Desert Cities) that Broadway audiences crave.